Heather Meeker
The Silicon Valley lawyer behind a striking share of the licenses that sit just outside open source.
Meeker has worked on open source licensing since the 1990s and wrote Open (Source) for Business, the practical handbook corporate lawyers reach for when they need to understand what copyleft actually demands. Her clients have been on both sides: companies that want to use open code, and companies that want to stop cloud giants from using theirs for free.
The second group gave her an unusual role. She drafted the Commons Clause in 2018 and helped launch the PolyForm project a year later — reusable licenses for source-available code, so every startup didn't have to invent its own. Critics saw it as eroding open source; she describes it as putting an honest label on something that was already happening.